The correct approach is to use threading.Event. For example:

import threading

e = threading.Event()
e.wait(timeout=100)   # instead of time.sleep(100)

In the other thread, you need to have access to e. You can interrupt the sleep by issuing:

e.set()

This will immediately interrupt the sleep. You can check the return value of e.wait to determine whether it's timed out or interrupted. For more information refer to the documentation: https://docs.python.org/3/library/threading.html#event-objects .

It is generally a bad pattern to kill a thread abruptly, in Python, and in any language. Think of the following cases:

• the thread is holding a critical resource that must be closed properly
• the thread has created several other threads that must be killed as well.

The nice way of handling this, if you can afford it (if you are managing your own threads), is to have an exit_request flag that each thread checks on a regular interval to see if it is time for it to exit.

For example:

import threading

class StoppableThread(threading.Thread):
    """Thread class with a stop() method. The thread itself has to check
    regularly for the stopped() condition."""

    def __init__(self,  *args, **kwargs):
        super(StoppableThread, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)
        self._stop_event = threading.Event()

    def stop(self):
        self._stop_event.set()

    def stopped(self):
        return self._stop_event.is_set()

In this code, you should call stop() on the thread when you want it to exit, and wait for the thread to exit properly using join(). The thread should check the stop flag at regular intervals.

There are cases, however, when you really need to kill a thread. An example is when you are wrapping an external library that is busy for long calls, and you want to interrupt it.

The following code allows (with some restrictions) to raise an Exception in a Python thread:

def _async_raise(tid, exctype):
    '''Raises an exception in the threads with id tid'''
    if not inspect.isclass(exctype):
        raise TypeError("Only types can be raised (not instances)")
    res = ctypes.pythonapi.PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(ctypes.c_long(tid),
                                                     ctypes.py_object(exctype))
    if res == 0:
        raise ValueError("invalid thread id")
    elif res != 1:
        # "if it returns a number greater than one, you're in trouble,
        # and you should call it again with exc=NULL to revert the effect"
        ctypes.pythonapi.PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(ctypes.c_long(tid), None)
        raise SystemError("PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc failed")

class ThreadWithExc(threading.Thread):
    '''A thread class that supports raising an exception in the thread from
       another thread.
    '''
    def _get_my_tid(self):
        """determines this (self's) thread id

        CAREFUL: this function is executed in the context of the caller
        thread, to get the identity of the thread represented by this
        instance.
        """
        if not self.is_alive(): # Note: self.isAlive() on older version of Python
            raise threading.ThreadError("the thread is not active")

        # do we have it cached?
        if hasattr(self, "_thread_id"):
            return self._thread_id

        # no, look for it in the _active dict
        for tid, tobj in threading._active.items():
            if tobj is self:
                self._thread_id = tid
                return tid

        # TODO: in python 2.6, there's a simpler way to do: self.ident

        raise AssertionError("could not determine the thread's id")

    def raise_exc(self, exctype):
        """Raises the given exception type in the context of this thread.

        If the thread is busy in a system call (time.sleep(),
        socket.accept(), ...), the exception is simply ignored.

        If you are sure that your exception should terminate the thread,
        one way to ensure that it works is:

            t = ThreadWithExc( ... )
            ...
            t.raise_exc( SomeException )
            while t.isAlive():
                time.sleep( 0.1 )
                t.raise_exc( SomeException )

        If the exception is to be caught by the thread, you need a way to
        check that your thread has caught it.

        CAREFUL: this function is executed in the context of the
        caller thread, to raise an exception in the context of the
        thread represented by this instance.
        """
        _async_raise( self._get_my_tid(), exctype )

(Based on Killable Threads by Tomer Filiba. The quote about the return value of PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc appears to be from an old version of Python.)

As noted in the documentation, this is not a magic bullet because if the thread is busy outside the Python interpreter, it will not catch the interruption.

A good usage pattern of this code is to have the thread catch a specific exception and perform the cleanup. That way, you can interrupt a task and still have proper cleanup.

Threaded stoppable function

Instead of subclassing threading.Thread, one can modify the function to allow stopping by a flag.

We need an object, accessible to running function, to which we set the flag to stop running.

We can use threading.currentThread() object.

import threading
import time


def doit(arg):
    t = threading.currentThread()
    while getattr(t, "do_run", True):
        print ("working on %s" % arg)
        time.sleep(1)
    print("Stopping as you wish.")


def main():
    t = threading.Thread(target=doit, args=("task",))
    t.start()
    time.sleep(5)
    t.do_run = False
    

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

The trick is, that the running thread can have attached additional properties. The solution builds on assumptions:

• the thread has a property "do_run" with default value True
• driving parent process can assign to started thread the property "do_run" to False.

Running the code, we get following output:

$ python stopthread.py                                                        
working on task
working on task
working on task
working on task
working on task
Stopping as you wish.

Pill to kill - using Event

Other alternative is to use threading.Event as function argument. It is by default False, but external process can "set it" (to True) and function can learn about it using wait(timeout) function.

We can wait with zero timeout, but we can also use it as the sleeping timer (used below).

def doit(stop_event, arg):
    while not stop_event.wait(1):
        print ("working on %s" % arg)
    print("Stopping as you wish.")


def main():
    pill2kill = threading.Event()
    t = threading.Thread(target=doit, args=(pill2kill, "task"))
    t.start()
    time.sleep(5)
    pill2kill.set()
    t.join()

Edit: I tried this in Python 3.6. stop_event.wait() blocks the event (and so the while loop) until release. It does not return a boolean value. Using stop_event.is_set() works instead.

Stopping multiple threads with one pill

Advantage of pill to kill is better seen, if we have to stop multiple threads at once, as one pill will work for all.

The doit will not change at all, only the main handles the threads a bit differently.

def main():
    pill2kill = threading.Event()
    tasks = ["task ONE", "task TWO", "task THREE"]

    def thread_gen(pill2kill, tasks):
        for task in tasks:
            t = threading.Thread(target=doit, args=(pill2kill, task))
            yield t

    threads = list(thread_gen(pill2kill, tasks))
    for thread in threads:
        thread.start()
    time.sleep(5)
    pill2kill.set()
    for thread in threads:
        thread.join()

I think below code will solve your problem.

We need to konow that :

Python signal handlers are always executed in the main Python thread of the main interpreter, even if the signal was received in another thread

We send our process SIGUSR1 signal in the subthread.

The SIGUSR1 and SIGUSR2 signals are set aside for you to use any way you want. They’re useful for simple interprocess communication, if you write a signal handler for them in the program that receives the signal.

In our case this signals will be handled in the main thread. When subthread send signal to own process, signal handler run in the main thread and we will throw an exception in the signal handler. After that exception, your do_Something() catch this exception and will enter to SubThreadException block, in this block you can do some cleanup. After the cleanup() we throw the SubThreadException again because we need to run your doSomethingElse() func.

class SubThreadException(Exception):
    pass

def usr1_handler(signum, frame):
    raise SubThreadException()

signal.signal(signal.SIGUSR1,usr1_handler) 

def watch():
    while True:
        sleep(10)
        somethingWrong = check()
        if somethingWrong:
            os.kill(os.getpid(),signal.SIGUSR1)
                    
def doSomething():
    try:
        #your work here
    except SubThreadException:
        cleanup() #your cleanup, like close the file,flush the buffer
        raise SubThreadException
        
try:
    watcher = threading.Thread(target=watch)
    watcher.start()
    doSomething() # This function could run several days and it cannot detect something wrong within itself, so I need the other thread watcher to check if this function perform well. In case of malfunction, the watcher should interrupt this function and ask the main thread to doSomethingElse
except SubThreadException:
    doSomethingElse()

But there are some cases as noted in the python signal module doc :

If a signal handler raises an exception, the exception will be propagated to the main thread and may be raised after any bytecode instruction. Most notably, a KeyboardInterrupt may appear at any point during execution. Most Python code, including the standard library, cannot be made robust against this, and so a KeyboardInterrupt (or any other exception resulting from a signal handler) may on rare occasions put the program in an unexpected state

A similar question is "How do you kill a thread?"

You create an exit handler in your thread that is controlled by a lock or event object from the threading module. You then simply remove the lock or signal the event object. This informs the thread it should stop processing and exit gracefully. After signaling the thread in your main program, the only thing left to do is to use the thread.join() method in main which will wait for the thread to shut down.

A short example:

import threading
import time

def timed_output(name, delay, run_event):
    while run_event.is_set():
        time.sleep(delay)
        print name,": New Message!"


def main():
    run_event = threading.Event()
    run_event.set()
    d1 = 1
    t1 = threading.Thread(target = timed_output, args = ("bob",d1,run_event))

    d2 = 2
    t2 = threading.Thread(target = timed_output, args = ("paul",d2,run_event))

    t1.start()
    time.sleep(.5)
    t2.start()

    try:
        while 1:
            time.sleep(.1)
    except KeyboardInterrupt:
        print "attempting to close threads. Max wait =",max(d1,d2)
        run_event.clear()
        t1.join()
        t2.join()
        print "threads successfully closed"

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

If you REALLY need the functionality of killing a thread, use multiprocessing. It allows you to send SIGTERMs to individual "processes" (it's also very similar to the threading module). Generally speaking, threading is for when you are IO-bound, and multiprocessing is for when you are truly processor-bound.